


Where Mountains Meet

by Mertiya



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canon Compliant, Chance Meetings, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:21:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26069389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: In Valinor, Frodo meets an Elf and they understand one another.
Relationships: Celebrimbor & Frodo
Comments: 17
Kudos: 66





	Where Mountains Meet

**Author's Note:**

> I just...think they have a lot to say to one another? I've probably only barely scratched the surface here.
> 
> title from the lay of leithian i'm predictable

Valinor is very beautiful. It is full of shining mountains and brilliant green hills, wildflowers that bloom thickly in every part. It is, perhaps, a little too grand for one small hobbit, but Frodo can still appreciate its loveliness. Still, he feels weary and out of place here. The Elves he has met here have all been kind, but they lack something he is used to in the Elves he knew from Middle Earth. Some indefinable thread of understanding that lies between himself and Elrond, that these Elves who have always lived in this golden land can never know.

But Frodo does not want to spend all his time with familiar faces. If he is to heal, he knows that he must venture forth and create new memories of a new place and not dwell overmuch on the past. So he has started taking long hikes in the countryside, listening to the drone and hum of bees, plucking wildflowers and making wreaths as he used to when he was a little faunt. He often speaks with the Elves he runs across on these outings, which is how he knows that the Elves here are different from the ones in Middle Earth.

Today, he chooses a new direction, tramping up a particularly steep mountain road. He wants to exhaust himself, so that when he sleeps, he will not dream of fire and pain, so that he will not wake in the middle of the night with his tongue swollen and his mouth dry and tasting of ash. Frodo shudders and deliberately begins to sing one of Bilbo’s old walking songs. His own clear voice echoing about the bright, sharp mountain peaks revives him a little. Then, to his surprise, he hears an answering song that is not an echo.

He sees the Elf seated on a flat ridge by the side of the path. Beyond him there is a pitched tent, and Frodo smells the delicious aroma of cooking fish as he approaches. The Elf looks up as Frodo approaches, then blinks and looks again. Frodo, who is used to the confusion of the Valinor Elves upon first seeing him, smiles ruefully. The Elf recovers himself after a moment and gestures politely to another seat by his fire. 

“Hello!” Frodo calls, a little more cheerily than he might prefer, but he has found that his tendency towards melancholy can be off-putting. “I am Frodo Baggins, lately of the Shire. At your service.” He bows.

The Elf rises carefully and bows back. “I am Celebrimbor, son of Curufinwë. At your service as well.” The name sounds vaguely familiar, but Frodo cannot quite place it.

He’s different from the other Elves that Frodo has met in Valinor, and Frodo senses it immediately, a subtle weariness, a kind of smooth transparency, like sea-worn glass. Even without that sense, he could see it: the Elves who have never left Valinor are unmarked, unblemished, but this Elf has scars. More than Frodo has seen on an Elf before. His face and hands are unmarked, but his arms are covered with them, long, thin, deliberate-looking scars that twine up beneath his shirt and poke out along his collar-bone.

“Would you care to join me for breakfast?” Celebrimbor asks politely, and he seems to mean it, so Frodo thanks him and sits.

They eat together in silence for a while; then Celebrimbor speaks. “You are the Ring-bearer, are you not?” he asks. “I heard of your arrival.”

“That’s right.” Frodo is a little tired of talking about it, but it’s hard to escape, when he is one of the only hobbits on these shores. And there is something more than curiosity in Celebrimbor’s voice—a wistfulness that Frodo suspects drives him to ask. “I’ve come for healing,” he finds himself saying. “Although all my physical wounds healed long ago.”

Celebrimbor smiles slightly at that. “And I suppose you have met many here who do not understand that?” he probes gently. Frodo nods. “Yes. As have I.”

_Why_ does his name sound so familiar? As he shifts, the scar on his collarbone becomes clearer, and Frodo sees that it is a knot of white tissue with lines radiating out from it—an eight-pointed star. Then he remembers. “Wait!” he exclaims. “I know you—you carved the doors of Moria!”

A wistful smile appears on the Elf’s lips. “Oh, you visited Moria, did you? Was it to your liking?”

“I am afraid it was rather…dark and gloomy,” Frodo admits. “But then it had long fallen into disrepair. You could still see it must have been beautiful when it was not overrun with orcs and other foul things.”

“Yes.” Celebrimbor flexes his hands. “So it was, though I did not see so at first.” He sighs, his eyes focusing somewhere in the middle distance.

“Your riddle gave us all quite a lot of trouble,” Frodo tells him, and this time Celebrimbor laughs.

“Ah—I had almost forgotten. Narvi and I argued over it for some time, but eventually he gave in.”

“Gandalf said that…those were happier times,” Frodo says awkwardly, after a moment, but he finds he is looking at those fine white scars again. 

Celebrimbor follows his gaze. “Happier than what?” he asks, with a twisted little smile. “But there was happiness,” he conceded after a moment. “Great happiness and great sorrow.”

Frodo nods seriously. “I understand that,” he says uncertainly, thinking of the sweetness of Sam’s smile and the sturdiness of his hand beneath Frodo’s elbow even in the midst of pain and torment.

“I knew what I was doing,” Celebrimbor says suddenly. “I trusted because I chose to trust.” He runs a hand across the scars adorning his throat. “And I would do so again, no matter how it ended.”

Frodo looks at him for a long moment. “I thought I was so wise,” he says. “Even by the time we reached Moria, I thought I knew what a hard journey looked like. I cannot presume to judge.”

He is favored with a bright smile that Frodo thinks is all the brighter for the scars he wears so proudly. “Perhaps you _are_ wise, little one,” Celebrimbor tells him lightly. “You must have seen a great deal more than those who have never left these hallowed shores.”

“I would do it all again to protect the folk I left behind,” Frodo says, “though in the end I did not protect them as much as I had hoped.”

“From what I have heard, you were a great deal more successful than I was.”

“But you would do it all again?”

Celebrimbor looks off into the middle distance. “I do not think I could have done anything to change the outcome,” he says seriously. “But I believe in the choices that I made, and I believe that they led to joy there would not have otherwise been. Fleeting, yes, but joy all the same.”

Frodo nods again. A group of birds wing by swiftly overhead, and a cheerful little breeze plays across the nape of his neck. He thinks that this may be how a friendship begins, through shared sorrow. Perhaps in the future there will also be shared joy. “I am glad I met you,” he tells Celebrimbor frankly, and Celebrimbor smiles.

“And I am glad I met you as well, Frodo. Would you like to walk together for a little while?”

“I would like that very much. May I help you clean up your campsite?”

“Thank you, it would be much appreciated.”

They tidy up in silence, dousing the fire and striking the tent. As Celebrimbor packs up the last of his things, he turns once more back to Frodo. “May I ask you something that may be a difficult question?” he says in a low voice. Frodo senses that he is truly asking, that he will not push if Frodo tells him no. And he already feels this bond growing between them, so he considers, then nods.

“Did you know when the Enemy died?”

“It is…all a muddle,” Frodo confesses, shivering a little at thinking back to the heat and flames, the pain in his hand, Sam’s arms about him. “But I believe I did.”

“Was it swift?” Celebrimbor chokes out, and when Frodo looks over at him, he sees that those unblemished hands are twisted into knots, the nails digging into the unmarked palms.

The sound of a scream in his ears, and the feeling of the spell unknotting, the wind rising. All of it over the span of seconds. “Yes. I think so.”

Celebrimbor nods tightly and exhales. “I’m glad,” he says. “I’m glad.” And Frodo does not push him to explain.


End file.
